'The Austrian State Prize for Literature' by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Carol Brown Janeway (First published in Meine Preise, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009. Everything I know about writing comes from having lived in them. They remain my tutors, my interlocutors, my imagined subjects, my partners in the crime of imagining. To drag this logic to its appropriate end, the selected fictions persist as events in my life, things which took place, worlds that continued to exist long after the reading ended. I cannot separate the reading from the being-alive in that moment. I remember the places (airport bars, park benches, a tree in the yard, etc.) I sat when first meeting each of these stories. One can despise metaphysics but still acknowledge that incredible stories become events in our lives. Like Nabokov, I can't fathom the value of writing something that hasn't actually 'happened' or existed in some shape or another. This is even truer for writers, whose words exist in relation to their literary lineage.
